On May 21st, Arden Thomas, product manager for Cincom Smalltalk will be proving us with a presentation on Web Velocity , a Seaside based framework for the rapid development of web based apps.

Carl Gundel , developer of LibertyBasic , a development environment for Basic written in VisualWorks, will be presenting at NYC Smalltalk on Wednesday, May 30th, 2007. Open house starts at 6:30 pm and the presentation follows at 7:00pm. We usually go out for drinks/food to a nearby restaurant/bar..

Our meetings are opened to the general public.

For directions go to our web site:

http://www.nycsmalltalk.org

Bio:

Carl Gundel is a long time Smalltalker (since 1988) who got his start using Digitalk’s Smalltalk/V for DOS. Since then he’s used Smalltalk to craft everything from shop floor control to CNC editors to programming languages.

Abstract:

Carl will present Run BASIC; a web programming system. Run BASIC focuses on making web development easy; sort of a QBasic for the web. Run BASIC is based on Carl’s popular Liberty BASIC language and is implemented on top of VisualWorks and Seaside.

http://www.libertybasic.com

Please join us for our next presentation Wednesday 28th of March 2007. See you all there and visit our web site for time and directions:

http://www.nycsmalltalk.org

Details:

BIO:

Mr. Panu Viljamaa is an OO-, XML-, and web-based -programming expert currently working as an independent consultant in New York City. He’s been working as a Smalltalk programmer-architect since 1986. His current tools include J2EE, “Ajax” and “REST” as well. His writings on software have been published in the Addison-Wesley series on Design Patterns and by ACM. He’s worked extensively as a software engineer in the telecom-, financial-, utilities- and e-learning domains in both United States and Europe.

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Abstract:

In this presentation Panu will talk about Unit-Testing in Smalltalk, including a new simplified “Method-Tests” -API for doing so.
He will demonstrate how unit-testing can be made more productive and totally integrated with the open IDE of Smalltalk. This presentation will be a precursor, and a dress-rehearsal for a more comprehensive presentation to be given at Smalltalk Solutions 2007, Toronto.

Recently I was asked by Joe Backansas, and Joe forgive me if I have slaughtered your name, if I would consider podcasting the NYC Smalltalk meetings. In his words that “would really be cool”. Then a few weeks later James Robertson , which you all know very well, inquired as well.

Well, I’m swamped but with regards to this, things were just falling in place. I recently purchased a new PC to do be able to handle professional level hard disk recording. My hard disk recording software Adobe Audition recently won an award at a Podcaster’s conference. I have been listening to a podcast on how to podcast using Adobe Audition and I certainly could use exercising my sound engineering chops.

So I will be giving this a shot.

In my music blog I talk about some of the obstacles involved and how I expect those will be conquered.

I will report back and hopefully have a podcast to share fairly soon. Our next NYC Smalltalk meeting is actually tonite.

-Charles

http://www.monteirosfusion.com

Give me more classes is what Andres Valloud says. He will shows us how more classes can in some cases equate to better Smalltalk performance.

Andres will be providing us with an encore presentation of his recent OOPSLA presentation.

The next meeting will be Wednesday November 29th, 2006. It will be the last for this year since we will be taking a break for the holidays.

Same place except its on the 11th Floor and our regular same time.

Directions:

Take A,C,E to 34th street Penn Station. For that matter any train stopping at 34th street would suffice such as N,R,2,3. The New Yorker Hotel is at the corner of 34th and 8th, see the star on the map above. Walk to the corner of 34th and 9th. Meeting is held at: 440 W. 9th Ave, Fl 11. Meetings run from 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm .The first half hour is an open house where individuals new to Smalltalk can ask any question regarding Smalltalk of any of our seasoned Smalltalkers. After the presentation we go around the corner to the New Yorker Hotel and have a couple of beers and talk more Smalltalk and other related tangents that come up.

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The Presentation

The abstract:

This presentation shows how to substantially increase the performance
of Smalltalk programs by creating more classes to take advantage of
polymorphism. An improved implementation of the well-known message
match:, using this and other techniques, can run up to twice as fast
as the current inlined implementation VisualWorks Smalltalk includes.
In this particular case, creating more classes is shown to be so
powerful as to become preferable to heavy use of identity checks on
immediate objects by a margin of up to 20% on average. In addition,
non-inlined implementations compare quite well to the existing inlined
implementation of match:. While they can run faster in some cases,
their overall performance falls behind by no more than a factor of 2.

This is a quick summary of chapter 3 from my book currently being
written. It is due to be published in 2007.

The bio:

Andres has been programming since age 10, has been programming in
Smalltalk for the last 10 years, and has been an artist at it for the
last 5 years. He has received a check from Donald Knuth regarding The
Art of Computer Programming. He is currently writing a book on
Smalltalk. He won the Smalltalk Solutions 2006 Coding Contest, and
he was a presenter at OOPSLA 2006 as well. Presently, he works as a
consultant at JP Morgan.

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See you all there.

Charles

http://feeds.feedburner.com/MonteirosFusion

due to the upcoming heavy rains on Wednesday, the fact that a lot of
our members drive including our presenter which is coming from deep
Jersey, the fact that the 18th also happens to be one of our regular’s
birthday which he will be spending with his immediate family, we shall
be postponing our presentation till next Wednesday the 25th which will
be in direct conflict with OOPSLA

we apologize for any inconveniences

BTW, anybody else that has a shrink wrapped Smalltalk application that they would like demo please send me email.

thanks

the management
NYC Smalltalk

Hi all. Andres Vallound , one of our members here at NYC Smalltalk and the recent winner of the Smalltalk Solutions 2006 coding contest will be presenting. He plans on showing us what it took to win the contest. Should be fun. As always we will also meet after the presentation for some beers and etc and continue the discussions there at La Vigna, the restaurant right inside of the New Yorker hotel around the corner from the presentation.

Some details here:

Date & Time

Wednesday, September 13th, 2006

Open house — 6:30 PM

Presentation — 7:00 PM – approx 8 PM

Drinks and Food — after at La Vigna

Directions can be found on our web site.

Abstract

This presentation describes an approach to the coding
contest at Smalltalk Solutions 2006. Many deep abstraction techniques
are put to use to deliver a framework of expression that is extremely
easy to change and maintain. Part playing video games and part
introspective, this strategy was awarded first place in Toronto.

Bio

Andres has been programming since age 10, has been programming in
Smalltalk for the last 10 years, and has been an artist at it for the
last 5 years. He has received a check from Donald Knuth regarding The
Art of Computer Programming. He is currently writing a book on
Smalltalk. He recently won the Smalltalk Solutions 2006 Coding
Contest, and has been accepted as a presenter at OOPSLA 2006.
Presently, he works as a Smalltalk consultant at JP Morgan.

I had already known what going to a 64 bit architecture meant to Gemstone Smalltalk as far as scalability thresholds. That in itself is amazing. What I had not realized was all of the rest that comes with the 64 bit release. It quite a lot of stuff. I won’t recap here but rather one can find the presentation here at our Yahoo groups web site. If you are not a member, you will have to join but that takes a second. The other interesting note is that it seems that Gemstone would like to be the StORE repository of choice for VisualWorks. VW and Gemstone are a natural fit. StORE on the other hand currently expects to have an RDMS as its backend. Cincom seems to be making moves to fronting that with GLORP which is basically an offshoot of TopLink an O-R mapping framework. Btw, the lead architect for GLORP was also one of the lead architects for TopLink, an interesting framework in its own right. It would not seem that a Gemstone / StORE marriage is likely anytime soon. We’ll have to just wait and see how it plays out. Perhaps a CampSmalltalk project can get this off the ground.

Finally, another interesting tidbit is that, if I recall correctly, now something like 20% of the world’s transportation is running using VisualWorks/Gemstone Smalltalk. Maybe one of our members recalls the exact number quoted. Feel free to correct me.

Unless you are here , there is no way that people can truly appreciate what is going on and therefore comments sympathetic or “understanding” of this strike will miss their mark and perhaps just plain piss people off. This is not just an inconvenience. This strike is really actually hurting people, they are spending money and time that they don’t have. In many cases lives are actually at risk, their health is at risk, daily life has become a torture. This is being done by people that have it pretty good comparatively speaking to the majority of “working class” people in New York, people who decided to break the law, who took advantage of the leverage that they have because of what they do. Imagine if cops decided to walk off the job. How about firefighters, nurses, teachers. They turned down a package that is better than most of other packages municipal workers have. That’s okay , it is their right to turn offers down. It is not their right to hurt the innocent in order to get their way. This is in fact an act of terrorism. One thousand TWU workers decided that what their organization was doing was wrong and returned to work today. The TWU’s parent organization must think it is wrong because they are not supporting the TWU. I have no doubt that it is wrong and no doubt that the Taylor Law is a necessary protection. Time will tell if it is enough in its current implementation.

How am I being affected? Well, I’m okay personally. I can TightVNC to work, I use Skype for daily meetings. Our bug tracker has a https interface etc. However, my wife works in retail and a strike on Christmas week will probably kill the chances of making her numbers for this year. The real issue is the personal ordeal of getting to and from work. She has it bad but many have it much , much worse.

The picture to the right is of my brother’s backyard after Katrina paid South Florida a visit. Some in that area of Davie/Ft. Lauderdale went without power for almost two days. My brother still has not had his phone service restored. I was able to call my Dad though. Of course, compared to what Lousiana and Missisippi are going through Katrina was merely an inconvenience here. My family including myself lived through Andrew which I belived up to now was the biggest or at least most costly hurricaine to hit the U.S. Andrew was a category 5, Katrina made landfall at category 4 levels but a much bigger storm and therefore a much bigger mess. The nightmare is yet to begin. I was not able to move back into our home for about 10 months. The insurance relief is not quite enough and not very timely. There is a ton of red tape and life does not just wait for you. Whatever plans, goals one may have had may have to be put on hold for a while. Hurricaines are not huge killers at least not in the States but they can very definitely bump you and your plans off path and getting back on track can for many be very difficult.

These things are really getting out of hand, we are already up to the K’s and we have not yet passed Labor day.